Bowers & Wilkins Releases CM10 Flagship Standing Speaker

Bowers & Wilkins’ new flagship standing speaker, the CM10, has just been announced, with a few key upgrades from previous models. It’s meant to be a sound machine – one of the best you can find just about anywhere.

One change made is that the tweeter is now located on top of the stack, and has a double layer of aluminum, which makes the tweeter a little sturdier and better able to resist distortion at high frequencies. That bumps the threshold for distortion up to 38 kHZ from 30 kHz, making the sound clearer than previous models.

As for the midrange, the CM10’s Kevlar midrange driver has also been moved farther up the speaker stack, to improve sound dispersion in the room. That driver is also decoupled from everything else, a first for Bowers & Wilkins’ flagship series.

Reshuffling the location of the tweeters and mid-range speakers has allowed for more room for bass drivers, so Bowers & Wilkins has managed to stuff three of them in there, compared to two from the CM10’s predecessor. Because of this, the bass on the CM10 is purer, and the speaker can be tuned lower than previously possible without distortion.

The Bowers & Wilkins CM10 looks like it’s a fine-tuning of previous models, and, given the quality of their previous speakers, it should be very interesting to find out just what the CM10 is capable of. It’ll be available in August for $4,000 for a pair of speakers, and will come with Rosenut or Wengé wood veneers, or a black gloss finish.

Making ones ears “bleed” is a highly, *highly* negative way to describe the speakers. I’m not sure if that was the intention, but I thought I’d point it out.

Kevin

Actually, the CM10 is not the company’s flagship speaker. It’s the flagship speaker of the CM series; however the company’s overall flagship speaker is within it’s flagship speaker series, the 800 series, which costs considerably more.